We are planning many improvements to our OpenStack Essex and Crowbar Framework; however, most deployments can proceed without these enhancements. This also enables participants in the 5/31 OpenStack Essex Deploy Day.

By releasing a core stable Essex reference deployment, we are accelerating field deployments and enabling the OpenStack ecosystem. In terms of previous posts, we are eliminating release interlocks to enable more downstream development. Ultimately, we hope that we are also creating a baseline OpenStack deployment.

We are also reducing the pressure to rush more disruptive Crowbar changes (like enabling high availability, adding multiple operating systems, moving to Rails 3, fewer crowbarisms in cookbooks and streamlining networking). With this foundational Essex release behind us (we call it an MVP), we can work on more depth and breadth of capability in OpenStack.

One small challenge, some of the changes that we’d expected to drop have been postponed slightly. Specifically, markdown based documentation (/docs) and some new UI pages (/network/nodes, /nodes/families). All are already in the product under but not wired into the default UI (basically, a split test).

On the bright side, we did manage to expose 10g networking awareness for barclamps; however, we have notyet refactored to barclamps to leverage the change.